Alexandria Rieger: Process Documentation
Corporate Identity, Fall 2017
Table of Contents
Project 6: Identity System 2
Project 5: Identity Systems
Project 4: Restaurant Logo
Project 3: Museum Logo
Project 2: Olympic Bid Logo
Project 1: We Stand Together
Project 6: Identity System 2
Menu Design
Style Guide Attempt Two
Style Guide Attempt One
Critique Notes:
- Add page numbers
- Increase page size
- Open space inside spreads
- Lessen line thickness
- Switch up colours through spreads
- Change the body text from HOBO to GARAMOND.
- Revise Mission Statement (Proofread)
- Revise Logo & Logo Usage (Proofread).
- Insert alphabet on fonts page.
- Change some of logo integrity examples.
Second Attempt: ID System Restaurant
First Attempt: ID system Restaurant
Critique Notes:
Business Cards: For front, use logo with initials, have name placed below. For back, red and white panes. Be careful to balance type.
Envelope: Use curved envelope. Make bottom half of envelope white. Move logo to corner next to text.
Folder: Reduce colours on outside. Change inside to white. (?) Create areas in pockets for envelope and letterhead. Resize to better fit letterhead.
Letterhead (front): Vertical logo on the side. Switch from right to left side. Clear space below logo and put information under it.
Letterhead (back): Vertical logo surrounded by white panes.Rearrange panes and logo to align with logo on back. Make sure the design can be seen through paperstock.
Project 5: Identity System
Second Attempt: Unified System
Critique Notes: Business Cards: Front is fine. Simplify back. Eliminate BKG colour. Make motions with words. Use as basis for alignments.
Envelope: Rounded corners. Move Logo up to corner. Move client info to other corner. use sun to mark stamp location. Overlap trees.
Folder: Eliminate greens of trees. Allow logo without green to take center stage. Eliminate bottom white. Use blue highlights (like logo) instead of trees for the pockets. Eliminate unnecessary flaps.
Letterhead: Try pattern of tree whites for back. Simplify and us overlap for front. Align all names at bottom (make names small). Add relevent info to top.
Critique Notes:
- Immediate positive response to wilderness image
- Go ahead with “playful” image business card
- White back — avoid black if possible.
- incorporate playful design into other parts of id system
- more custom typography
- use “fun” sans serif font for body copy, if needed.
Read/Respond: 10/25
• Choose one you redesign you think is successful and one you have issue with. Talk about why.
One of the redesigns that I liked more than the original was the redesign for MVV. Their original logo was very static and plain, allowing it to recede into the background with other plain logos. The new MVV logo, on the other hand, is very vibrant and energetic, creating an infinite loop to show how energy is recycled, and using a white glowing effect where it overlaps to give the feeling that it literally thrums with energy. On the other hand, the new logo for IBM Watson is one I take issue with. While I do think that the original logo may be a little too cluttered, I think that it lost some of what it was trying to communicate when it got simplified.
• Choose a third that has a strong identity system (business card, letterhead, envelope). What elements do you find most interesting? How do they relate to the logo, the design concept?
I think the business cards developed for Graphcore are quite lovely. They are simplistic with a pleasant palette and shapes, and, to tie into Graphcore’s identity as a developer of ‘intelligent’ technology, are developed by an engine that uses an assortment of shapes in a grid generated by the engines.
Project 4: Restaurant Logo
Final Logo:
Colour Trials:
First Page: Black and White final model 3" and 1".
Second page: Peach backgrounds. (Rainbow colour scheme: too distracting. Green colour scheme: Alright. Yellow colour scheme: Too hard to see. Purple/Red colour scheme: Doesn’t fit theme.)
Third Page: More Peach backgrounds (Green/Red Background: Too Christmas-like. Purple/Yellow: Doesn’t fit theme. Orange/Blue: Too hard to see. Green: Alright.)
Fourth Page: Green Background.(Green/Purple: Alright. Maybe not fitting. Red/Orange/Yellow: Alright. Blue/Red: Doesn’t fit theme. Orange: Alright. Maybe too bland.)
Fifth Page: Blue Background. (Red/Orange/Yellow: Alright. Maybe unfitting. Yellow/Green/Purple: Too hard to see, doesn’t fit theme. Green Shades: Alright. Yellow/Purple: Alright. Doesn’t fit theme.)
Sixth Page: Sampling other backgrounds. (Red BKG w/ Yellow,Blue, and Purple: Doesn’t Fit theme. Orange BKG w/ Blue: Alright. A little bland. Yellow BKG w/ Green text: Alright. Green BKG w/ Orange and Yellow: Alright. Maybe a little too dark.)
Black and White Trials:
Image One: The weakest of the three logo designs. To be discarded.
Image Two: The strongest of the three logo ideas. Diagonal design dynamic and stained glass aesthetic unique. Go forward with this design.
Image Three: Okay idea. The idea is an interesting one, but inferior to stained glass concept. Go forward with this design.
Restaurant Thumbnails
Going forward with: Tabletop Logo, Swirling Vine Logo, Stained Glass Logo
Namestorming:
Result: The Green House
Concept: Garden Bistro
Project 3: Museum Logo
Taglines:
- Make sure it’s your last stop.
- Be prepared for a good dose of reality.
- Discover the Traces of Death.
- Uncover a Darker World.
- Discover the Secret of the Dead.
- Tread Carefully…
- See the Cut Strings of Fate.
- The Tragic Stories of The Dead.
- Making Death our Life’s work.
- Try and Stay as long as you can…
- What does the company want to say to their audience?
The museum of death displays and educates about a variety of gruesome events of mass murder, such as serial killings and autopsy reports.
• What value does the company bring to their audience?
The museum of death gives a 45 minute long tour of the museum (though visitors can stay as long as they like) and have a plethroa of educational movies concerning the subjects on display.
• What benefits do they offer above the competitors?
The Museum of Death boasts the largest collection of serial murder artwork and the actual severed head of the blue beard of paris.
• How are they different from the others in their field?
There aren’t that many museums about mass killings, but this one seems to be the largest and most well known.
Response to The iPhone X Notch is All About Branding:
Now, I’m not sure what this says about me or about branding in general, but when I think about a product that incorperates its branding into the product itself, I think about cereal. Any number of cereals can work in this context, but the first one to pop into my head is the Lucky Charms cereal, where the shapes of the marshmellows became iconic to the marketing of cereal. There was even an annoying earworm that just listed the shapes of the marshmellows. It also tied into the identity of the leprechaun mascot, what with the shapes actually being the shapes of various lucky charms (such as horseshoes and clovers).
50 Thumbnails for Museum Logo (Chosen Museum: Museum of Death)
Project 2: Olympic Bid Logo
Critique Notes:
- Thicken lines on letterforms
- Add back counters
- Unsquish the letter ‘h’
- Make the outlines the same colour as the tree
- Add reflections to b&w (to see how they work in design)
- Colour Scheme suggestion: colours of Olympic Rings
- Colour Scheme suggestion: colour of reflection is white, letterforms are slowly darkening blue
- Colour Scheme suggestion: colour of reflection is blue, letterforms are white.
What additional tweaking/editing/revisions you could apply to your Olympic logo to elevate craft and/or communication of the intended concept/message?
I’m not entirely sure quite yet as to how these trends of design could improve my chosen design. Making it more skeuomorphic would take away from the design. Gradients, however, might be something I’d want to test out on my design.
How can you avoid revisions/additions that may unintentionally become decoration, a passé trend, or compromise readability?
Again, going for a skeuomorphic look would not do anything for my design. In fact, due to the nature of the type, doing too much to the design as is will compromise readability, which is something I will want to watch out for in revisions.
- According to the article, 81% of logos are one or two colors max. Why?
-According to the article, people choose only one or two colours for their logo in order to send a specific message with their logo using colour psychology. Too many colours could easily muddle your message or make your logo too visually cofusing for the reader.
2. Other than simply applying the Olympic ring color palette, what color combinations can support visual aesthetics and deepen your Olympic Bid Logo concept, especially in regard to your city?
Please create a one-color, two-color, three-color and full color palette with a rationale for each.
One-Colour: If I was only to use one colour, it would have to be blue, to both match the aquatic nature of the environment and to reflect the calm nature of the place/ Two-Colour:With two colours, I would choose blue and purple. Blue is calming and represents the natural water of the area, and purple both represents ceremony and compliments blue well as an analogous colour/ Three-Colour: For the three colour palette, I would go with blue, for natural tranquility, purple, for ceremony, and for how well it works with blue, and yellow, both for its complimentary relationship to blue and its playful nature/ Full Colour Palette: The full colour palette when applied to snow is very strange, until you remember that snow is by nature reflective. If you know what you’re doing, you can find cool versions of red, orange, and yellow, as well as blue and purple for shading. Green might not end up getting much use, though.
What I heard:
- First one was too obvious, looked like an ‘m’.
- Second one had good negative space, figure was problematic.
- Third was strongest, playful type, needs to relate to winter.
How I’ll move foreward:
- Move forward with the final design (splash type)
- Find a way to relate it to winter (snow instead of water?)
- As backup, fix issues with second design and re-present it.
Project 1: We Stand Together
- What was your initial reaction to the Whitney identity system after reading the first article?
— Honestly, my first response was kind of cynical. I thought the writer was giving maybe a little too much praise for what is essentially moving anchors around in Illustrator.
2. In your own words, describe what responsive design is. What are the pros and cons of applying responsive design to an identity system?
— Responsive design is when a design is created to be flexible around any sort of medium it is portrayed in. With design that flexible, it is very easy to keep the brand logo from being static, but on the other hand, it could easily muddle the branding in and of itself.
3. The new Whitney identity has been criticized as boring and duplicitous due its simplistic, open-ended design. Do you agree or disagree — why? Are boring and simple one in the same?
–I do agree with the assessment of the Whitney logo. Simplicity in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I think there is such a thing as going too simple, and the Whitney logo is too simple for me.
- Reflect on a time when you copied an idea — what did you learn from that experience? Would you do it again? Was there a way to solve the problem without copying?
— All the way back in Principles of Graphic Design, we had to create multiple t-shirt designs for ‘what is graphic design?’, and I got my influence from, oddly enough, the matrix. Still, I think I context was the big factor here: since it was being used to express ‘what is graphic design?’ nobody even noticed the copying. And yes, there were other ways to solve the problem, but I think my method of dealing with the problem thorougly effected my designs.
2. Were you ever the one that was stolen or ‘copied’ from? What was your reaction to that? How did you deal with it?
— Interestingly enough, this one has happened to me. Way back in high school I used to write short stories on a website not unlike this one, and ended up coming upon a pretty simple idea that turned into a pretty popular story. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I was quite surprised that, when going through my feed, I found a story that not only strongly resembled mine in plot and structure, but even indirectly quoting mine. My only reaction was mild amusement, I recall, and did not really do anything. I recall being quite curious as to how they would handle elements of the story that I’d found interesting or been troubled with.
3. Is anything original anymore?
— Well, no, but that doesn’t mean its the end of the world. Doing an old idea in an interesting way can be just as, if not more enjoyable, than a new idea.
Strongest Logo: Picture and Text Logo
Three Strengths: 1) From a conceptual level, it visibly gets the point across; 2)The choices of typeface get across which text is important immediately; 3)The filled in segments of the ‘Darkness’ text get the conceptual idea across visually.
Three Weaknesses: 1) The appearance of the stars on the top half of the logo can be hard to see; 2)The ‘filler text’ doesn’t seem to connect visually to the overall theme; 3) The ‘Darkness’ text may be slightly illegible.
Critique Results: Image design is too convoluted in concept to be successful. Image and word design has elements that work, but isn’t as strong as it could be. The text based one is strongest in concept, but still has many flaws. My final solution is to combine aspects of my text and text-and-image designs into one text-and-image design, and give the final design a definitive shape based upon the constellation ursa minor.
Chosen Theme: Hope
Synonyms: longing, dream, aspiration, belief, concern, desire, faith, optimism, promise, endurance, fortune, sanguine, utopia
Antonyms: disbelief, dislike, distrust, doubt, fear, hatred, despair, discouragement, pessimism
Idioms: Glimmer of Hope, Pinning one’s hopes on, Hope for the best, Hope Chest
Quotes: Only in the darkness can you see the stars — Martin Luther King Jr., When you have lost hope, you have lost everything. And when you think all is lost, when all is dire and bleak, there is always hope — Pittacus Lore, Walk on with hope in your heart, and you’ll never walk alone — Shah Rukh Khan
Further reflection/ideas/brainstorming: Not giving up, Strength, warmth in the cold, rebirth after destruction, Only in the darkness can you see the stars, Darkness and light
Darkness: Dark colors/literal darkness, blood, tears, ruins (literal), clouds, oil, pollution
Light: Stars, flowers, hearts, angels, children, clean water
- This is what I heard: It was hard to make out exactly what my designs were, but my quotes were the best parts.
2. This is what I think: I do have some good ideas here, I just need to figure out how to best portray them.
3. This is what I’m going to do: Grab my sketchbook and try to rework my better concepts into cleaner versions, then take to the computer.
